


First Editions

by SteadfastBrightStar



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 1920s, Historical AU, London, M/M, Modernism, could this be? another historical au? what a radical departure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 09:01:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4298748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SteadfastBrightStar/pseuds/SteadfastBrightStar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'For Mathias, the newness of the world is expressed through his poetry. Since adolescence, his writing has been unbounded, shaking off constraints of form. He scatters words like billiard balls; they are knocked out of order and shape by the force of the meaning that propels them. The lines ebb and flow like the movement of thoughts. Momentous events are accorded a handful of words; the crack in the neck of a vase takes a hundred. He extemporises. He turns every phrase over in his mind like a lump of clay until it is warm with life and truth.</p><p>Mr L. Kristiansen, poetry editor at Hanover Square Press, regrets to inform him that his work is not suitable for publication.'</p><p> </p><p>London, 1925. The war is over, and the city belongs to the Bright Young Things - rich young pleasure-seekers at the forefront of an artistic revolution. Mathias, a young Modernist poet, finds himself in conflict with Lukas, an editor who fails to see his genius. However, as their correspondence develops, the two will discover just how closely they are linked, and just how precious the relationship is to them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Editions

London, 1925  
It is seven years now since the guns fell silent and the soldiers, dazed and reeling from the shock of it all, made their unsteady way home. They have not been forgotten, for such a thing is impossible, but the nation has made a silent, unspoken decision not to acknowledge them. That way lies madness, and a misery to extinguish the tentative flame of new hope. A new generation is on the rise, one that spent its collective youth in the shadow of war, and one that has reached adulthood just in time to sample the delights of a changed world. Things are different now. Art, music and literature are warped and inverted, deliberately provocative. Everyone who can draw is an artist, and anyone who can’t is a writer. It hardly matters if they never sell a single work. They are the Bright Young Things, and they are as rich as they are controversial. The fashion is for rejecting one’s Victorian parents, Victorian morals, Victorian manners and styles and conventions. The world after war belongs to the young.

Mathias Køhler is one such young person. He is a poet by trade, albeit an unpublished one, but his friends reassure him constantly that his lack of success is not caused by a lack of talent, but rather by the eternal dullness of the older generation, the custodians of literature. Everything not glitteringly captivating is, to the Bright Young Things, boring – deadly, crushingly boring, like work and parents and moralising articles in stiff-collared newspapers. It is parties that hold their attention, if only for an hour or two at a time, parties and things that are new. For Mathias, the newness of the world is expressed through his poetry. Since adolescence, his writing has been unbounded, shaking off constraints of form. He scatters words like billiard balls; they are knocked out of order and shape by the force of the meaning that propels them. The lines ebb and flow like the movement of thoughts. Momentous events are accorded a handful of words; the crack in the neck of a vase takes a hundred. He extemporises. He turns every phrase over in his mind like a lump of clay until it is warm with life and truth.

Mr L. Kristiansen, poetry editor at Hanover Square Press, regrets to inform him that his work is not suitable for publication.

There is another party that evening. Mathias shows the prim, conservative letter to his friends and they all laugh at its tone, at the editor’s allergy to modernity. The world has changed. The war smashed it to bits and, even after repairs, it is not quite the same. How terribly boring, then, to be arguing over grammar and form when writing itself has undergone a sea change. In a hundred years, Mathias predicts, the only punctuation mark in the world will be the comma. He accepts another drink and lets the party swirl around him. In a minute or two he will take his place in the centre of the room where boys dance with boys and girls with girls. The old laws still stand, but it is easy to forget them here, where everyone is rich and young and flirting with art and sex. A friend gives him a friendly punch on the arm. Who needs the old people’s rubber-stamping, he says, when all your friends know your writing’s something special?

Lukas recognises the handwriting the moment the envelope lands on his desk. It’s thinner than before, he notes, as he makes a neat slit along the top with his silver-handled letter-opener. Perhaps this ludicrous Modernist movement is finally dying down. The poems themselves are average, to his critical eye – granted, there is the odd gem of lambent beauty glinting out of the mass of unremarkable verse, but for the most part the writing is dull and arrhythmic. It is the work of a young man straining for maturity and besides, the inconstant metre causes his inner voice to trip up in the most infuriating way. He slots a new sheet of paper into his typewriter.  
Dear Mr Køhler,  
I cannot in all conscience publish your writing without causing shame to both an esteemed publishing house and my own personal and professional judgement. Stylistic posturing, of which you are so fond, can neither replace profundity nor – most significantly – mask a total lack of talent and imagination.  
Yours Sincerely,  
Mr L. Kristiansen, Poetry Editor, Hanover Square Press

Lukas sits back and looks at what he has written. He knows that he is being unfair, but he has a feeling that the poet will bounce back. It is the arrogance that irritates him, the knowledge that this young man is almost certainly part of that ridiculous Bloomsbury set, a vapid Bright Young Thing for whom literature is a hobby, and not the sacred calling that Lukas knows it to be. He slides the letter into an envelope and hands it to his secretary to post.

The words sting for a moment when Mathias first reads them, like soap on broken skin, but then he simply laughs and imagines them spilling from the mouth of a puce-faced middle-aged man straining at the buttons of his waistcoat. Unperturbed, he goes into his bedroom and pulls out a few of his most inchoate drafts, things written drunk or lovesick, suffused with cigarette ash and the languor that comes with waking at midday. He gathers them together and puts them in an envelope bound for Hanover Square. Later, he will add a short note for the poetry editor’s delectation. He is beginning to enjoy their little game.

The newest envelope is neither entirely unexpected nor entirely unwelcome. Well, thinks Lukas as he unfolds the letter, if he wants to fight… ‘I know it must be painful,’ the arrogant poet has written, ‘to see that your Victorian world now belongs to the young, but I’m afraid that’s the way it is. I hope you’re sitting down, my dear sir, as I must inform you that the twentieth century began quite a while ago.’ Lukas almost laughs out loud at the candour. The man has confidence, no matter how unwarranted. And, he has to admit, there is a peculiar charm to some of the new batch of poems – unpolished and unaffected as they are, and filled with a certain youthful openness. He begins to type his reply. ‘You may wish to sit down yourself,’ he writes, ‘as I, like you, was born in the twentieth century. Furthermore, I suggest that, should you somehow succeed in gaining an advance from some unscrupulous publisher, your first purchase should be a new typewriter. Your current machine has an irritating habit of producing bad poetry.’ 

His fingers hover over the keys. He is aching to say something about the last poem in the pile, the one that touched him with a jolt like a missed step. To speak or not to speak? He resumes typing. ‘However,’ he writes, ‘I would not call your work irredeemable. Your untitled romantic fragment was rather pleasant in its unpretentiousness, and I would even venture to call it beautiful, in a half-formed, unorthodox way. Unfortunately, I cannot yet publish it. In my view, it is worthy, but unless you change ‘he’ to ‘she’, the censors will have a different opinion. I doubt that you are the sort of writer who makes copies, so I am sending it back for you to make the necessary changes.’

On his evening journey home, he cannot help casting his mind back to the poem. Romantic, he called it, but erotic would probably be a better word, deeply passionate and highly illegal in the type of desire it portrays. A type rather like his own. He hides his blush behind a book and waits for the bus driver to call his stop. Perhaps he will write personally to the poet and explain just how different his views on love are from those of the censors. Perhaps. But why take the trouble for a man he has never even met – for one who most likely has never been in love for more than a day or two? These Bright Young Things are all the same, he thinks with distaste, as two strikingly-dressed young women take their seats in front of him.

Mathias is rather shocked to discover that the editor is not the pompous, indignant, Establishment figure of his playful imagination, but a young man like himself. Perhaps, then, the man has a point when it comes to his criticisms. His friends, of course, will be quick to disabuse him of this notion, to tear up the rejection letters like confetti and let the shredded bits drift to the floor to be crushed under the dancers’ feet and picked up by someone who is none of their concern, and outside their interest. How boring, they will all say, in the languid drawl of habitual pleasure-seekers. How monumentally boring the editor must be, staggering under piles of boring poetry, publishing boring books, writing boring letters, going back to his boring flat at night and probably dismissing Mathias’s work out of sheer dullness or jealousy. But Mathias has never fully agreed with the crueller barbs of his friends’ witticisms, even if he is occasionally guilty of exhibiting the same unthinking self-confidence. He reads the second half of the letter with a stab of pride, and then of disappointment. Of course. He should have known that the truth about himself is not one that he can tell. Nonetheless, he has a plan to test this editor, and to see if the suspicions raised in him by the man’s cautious praise are correct. 

With a nervousness he is unaccustomed to feeling, he bends to open the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet, rifling through it to find what he is searching for. He has never typed up these poems. Most of them are first drafts, ripped bloody and premature from his mind before anything could temper their rawness. There are poems addressed to people, and those that grapple with emotions. There are poems addressed to strangers glimpsed on the street, and those written to friends, those peculiar friends where the friendship is shaded with an intensity beyond mere affection. There are poems written to the men who loved him, but whom he could not bring himself to love, and those whom he loved but did not love him in return, and poems written to love itself, about the pain of frustrated attraction, about the pain of realising that a love that seemed all-conquering is in fact ordinary and limited. In these poems, the truest expression of himself, ‘he’ can never become ‘she’. He does not know L. Kristiansen, Poetry Editor at Hanover Square Press, but he feels as if these works will be met with understanding. They cannot be published in his lifetime, he knows that, but he wants them to be read. He will send the bulging envelope in the first post tomorrow morning.

It is after midnight when Lukas finishes the last poem, puts it back into the envelope and finds himself unable to do anything else. The writing is imperfect – of course it is, when all the poet has sent him is a pile of first drafts – but it has pierced him. He thinks of his own miserable attempts at writing, now safely burnt to ashes and scraped out of the fireplace, and how they so often strained at the seams of convention and good taste, how the very words longed to spill over the page like the buildings of a city tumble down the sides of a valley. This poet has done that, and given voice to his own feelings. Lukas is, by nature and by choice, a serious man, and prefers to keep his emotions safely hidden away, but the poems have come perilously close to bringing a tear to his eye. Certainly, the poet’s youth is revealed in the occasional melodramatic turn, in the absence of a sense of proportion not gained without experience of life, but at its heart the message is true. In every poem is a part of himself, split into pieces so that each poem contains a line or two that arrows at his heart like frozen glass. He reads his own life in this man’s – this stranger’s – pain. 

In a moment, when he has finished his abandoned coffee, when he has stood up to wash the cup with the numbed movements and opiated stare of a man whose mind has flown free of his earthly concerns, when everything has been cleared away and when he has, without conviction, contemplated going to bed, he will take a piece of paper and his best letter-writing pen and begin a draft of his own.

The next letter is handwritten, and comes from an address on Wilton Street, Belgravia. A man of means, then, thinks Mathias. He reads it stretched out on his sofa, pleasantly half-asleep after the previous night’s amusements – another party, of course, at which he was persuaded (although he requires very little persuasion) to read out one of his poems. In the past, he has been accustomed to considering a poem complete the moment it is written; last night, however, he could hear the hollowness of his own words. The assembled friends applauded, but he could not help but think that the work was more about them than himself. He has not told any of them about his strange and continuing correspondence with the enigmatic Mr Kristiansen, feeling that, for once, the old-fashioned and much-derided virtue of discretion may be appropriate. 

‘Forgive me if I am too forward,’ the man has written, ‘or if I have misconstrued your meaning, but the work I received from you yesterday expressed my own experiences better than I could ever do myself. Your poetry is not perfect, and nor is it particularly measured or mature, but there is an untamed beauty in it – a truthfulness and a raw gift that, if refined, could be considerable. You know, of course, that such poetry is unpublishable, except anonymously, and you do not strike me as the sort of man to allow his success to be divorced from himself.’ There is a blot here – evidence of hesitation, of a pen pressed down as the words escaped or refused to obey. ‘I regret, therefore, that I cannot give you any further assistance. Your work will never be published by Hanover Square Press. The first poems you sent me were empty of meaning; the ones I read last night were too full of truth.’ He has signed off in the usual way. Mathias does not even know his first name. 

The letter fills him with profound sadness, and for days he writes nothing. He goes to two parties a night, pleads a sudden sore throat when begged to read, looks at the letter at least three times a day. He lines up the typed copies of the poems that were rejected out of hand – his very first submission to Hanover Square Press – and begins to go through them without the fatuous praise of his friends, to whom nothing matters very much, ringing in his ears. For three weeks, he cannot bring himself to reply to the letter – not as a poet, and certainly not as a man.

For three weeks, Lukas waits for a reply with increasing anxiety. He has given away too much of the truth; he has misunderstood, or been misunderstood himself. It is impossible to escape the hidden life of the city, and every glimpse of it is a reproach. From the surly rough trade of Trafalgar Square to the lipsticked queens of Piccadilly, they all seem to know his secret, to know with a single returned glance that he is one of their own. But it is not their approval he wants, nor even their recognition, but that of a man whose flame-blooded poems still flicker, half-remembered, through his mind, with the odd burst of clarity that mists his eyes with unexpected tears. Sifting through monumentally dull manuscripts, or waiting in the rain for a bus, or reading one of the Victorian novels that have, since the arrival of the new poems, suddenly turned flat and turgid, he often wonders why it is that he has come to feel so closely linked to one he has never met. It is new, this feeling, and beyond his comprehension.

After three weeks, the debut collection is as ready as it will ever be. Mathias has weighed up every word, tested each line for the invisible rhythms that are necessary even if he cannot quite bring himself to rhyme. Of the twenty-five poems he has selected, none are anything like the last bundle he sent to Kristiansen, who must by now be worrying about his correspondent’s prolonged silence. Those particular works of art can be discussed later. The editing done, he types up a letter – a cheerful, breezy note full of his characteristic optimism, apologising for his silence and explaining that the poems enclosed are no longer as dreadful as they used to be. ‘I wonder if it would be better to discuss the work in person,’ he writes in his final paragraph, ‘I trust you know The Lily Pond – would Friday at seven be convenient for you?’ It is a bold statement of intent. If Kristiansen is anything like him – and Mathias knows that he is – he will know this place well. Now he can only wait and see – and, in the meantime, decline his invitation to that dinner party on Friday.

The slick streaks of light from the streetlamps waver and glow on the dark, wet pavements as Lukas emerges from the Tube station, his hands – he forgot his gloves in his nervous hurry – marbled purple-white with cold. He jams his hat down to preserve his fresh, expensive Marcel wave and, for the hundredth time, reaches into his bag to check that the poet’s debut collection is still there. It is certainly an improvement, although when one knows the truth there is a sense of concealment to some of the poems, and a short lyric in praise of a woman’s beauty rings particularly false. It will have to be cut, he thinks sadly, longing for the day when the only thing that prevents a work from publication is its quality, not its content. He walks towards the restaurant, feeling the stares of the rough traders lined up along a shopfront and wishing he’d dressed a little less like a Dilly queen. It’s the hair that does it, he thinks wryly, and pushes the door open.

The bell on the door rings, and a draught disturbs the corner of the tablecloth as the door opens. Mathias looks up nervously from his cup of tea and sees a young man standing in the entrance, looking around for someone he cannot possibly recognise but nonetheless appearing coolly self-possessed. He is… It is difficult to put such beauty into words, but all at once Mathias finds that the unknown man of his poetic imagination has a face, a physical form. Stumbling a little, almost knocking over his chair in his haste, he stands up.   
“Good evening,” he says. “You wouldn’t happen to be looking for a certain unpublished poet, would you?”  
The man – the rather wonderful L. Kristiansen – turns towards him, removing his hat and revealing a perfect silver-gold Marcel wave, discreetly pinned back with a cross.  
“A poet I know only as M. Køhler, yes.” he replies.  
Mathias extends his hand and Lukas shakes it. “The M is for Mathias,” he explains. “I thought you might know of me, but then again you don’t seem like you read the gossip columns.”  
“The L is for Lukas,” Kristiansen explains in turn. “And no, I don’t.”

They take their seats, and Lukas occupies his trembling hands, fizzing with nerves and chilblains, with the buttons of his coat. Mathias is so thrillingly good-looking, he thinks, with a face and demeanour to match the playful, confident voice of his letters and the scattergun approach of some of his poems.  
“You’re not a Bright Young Thing, are you?” Lukas asks at length, cloaking his nerves about the meeting in careful urbanity.  
“I am but a lowly unpublished poet!” Mathias protests, spreading his hands ruefully.  
Lukas raises a critical eyebrow. “Albeit one who appears in the gossip columns.”  
“Not lowly, then,” Mathias admits. “But unpublished nonetheless. I do enjoy a party, it has to be said, and” – he winks at Lukas – “I won’t say no to a drink if it’s offered.”  
“A pity no one’s offering, then,” Lukas replies expressionlessly, secretly amused by the man’s nerve. “I don’t see why the successful literary editor should buy a drink for the unpublished poet. You buy your own drink and I’ll buy mine.”  
Mathias shrugs. It seems a fair enough idea, and besides, he’s anxious to get on to talk of poetry. “If you’d been paying,” he says with an air of mock defeat, “I’d have ordered the Chablis.”

They each have a third drink, then a fourth, and in what seems like minutes, the place is closing around them. A wind has picked up and the buses – infrequent now at this time of night – swing round the corners quite alarmingly. People walk the streets in pairs and groups that form and break like iron filings under a magnet. Mathias looks at his watch and realises that he and Lukas have been talking for three hours. His poetry collection has not made an appearance – instead, they have talked about everything that has come to mind, including the last batch of poems he sent, and just how meaningful they are to both of them. He hardly knows what he is saying anymore, not only because of the drink, but also because every cell of his body is focused on Lukas. The conversation has become a cascade of words, as unregimented as one of his poems, and as truthful as one of his romantic fragments. A few miles away, a party is going on without him, but he feels not even the slightest twinge of envy towards those who are there, those who will dress in their glittering finery and spend the evening drinking, dancing, shrieking, giggling and then finally declaring the whole bloody thing boring and going home to sleep until the afternoon.

“I think she wants us to leave.” Lukas says, with a subtle nod towards the waitress, who is making a point of wiping the tables closest to theirs. The other customers have long since vanished, but he hardly noticed when they left. He has quite forgotten Mathias’s debut collection, and almost everything else. They have been talking for hours – mostly Mathias, since he is quite content to be his usual quiet self – but now it is time for the evening to end. He cannot quite believe himself. A serious, intelligent, level-headed young man, a conscious avoider of parties and avowed enemy of Modernism – he is all these things, and yet here he is falling in love with a poet in an empty restaurant over too many glasses of wine.  
“We never even got to talk about my book.” Mathias remarks as they stand up to leave.  
“Manuscript,” Lukas corrects him. “It’s not a book until it’s published.”  
“So you’re not going to publish it?” Mathias asks, momentarily confused.  
“We never even got to discuss that.” Lukas points out.  
“If you don’t have to rush off anywhere,” Mathias replies, “We could always finish our debate back at my flat.”

The next morning is bright behind clouds, a white winter sun palely gleaming. A motor-car drives by slowly along the street below, its engine like the slow hiss of a wave. Lukas stirs first, lying half-asleep and listening to the sounds of a city springing into life. It strikes him as a sort of symmetry, the reverse of the nightly one-by-one extinguishing of the lights. Even at this hour, someone is playing music. He closes his eyes to better trace the diluted melody that twists and loses itself in its faintness. He could lie for hours in this calm.

After a while, Mathias wakes too. He lies and watches Lukas with a heady mixture of amusement and love, then eventually becomes restless and decides to break the silence.  
“Say what you like about poets,” he remarks sleepily. “But you can’t deny that we’re masters of seduction.”  
“I don’t remember being seduced.” Lukas languidly retorts, not bothering to hide his smile.  
Mathias pulls him into his arms they share the first kiss of the morning. “You’ve given me the idea for a new poem,” he says. “Unpublishable, of course. I shall whisper it into your ear later while ravishing you.”  
Lukas smirks. “We forgot to talk about the book again, didn’t we?”  
“Can’t think why.” Mathias replies sarcastically, making an expansive gesture to indicate the bedroom.  
“You’ll have to convince me it’s worth publishing.” Lukas teases.  
“I know a few ways of doing that,” Mathias says, pressing playful kisses to every inch of skin he can find. “All highly illegal, of course.”  
Lukas shakes his head in mock disapproval. “Alright, alright!” he says. “For God’s sake, I’ll publish your bloody poetry book!”


End file.
